Moved into this house in 2007, and for the past five years the converted garage ("bonus room") has been severely underutilized. Until now .... Time to use this wonderful space and build a respectable recording and mixing studio AND generally awesome man cave.

It's painted a wild shade of red, and rather than repaint I'm going to name this place "All Red Recording" and go with it.

Hope you folks enjoy periodic updates and plenty of pictures of the planning, organization, and building of this studio!

The planning stages are well underway. A friend of mine is an interior designer and she hooked me up with some CAD drawings. With her help, and that of Glenn from GIK Acoustics right here on GS, I chose this as the proper setup.

There are large glass paneled double doors on the walls top and left. The opening on the bottom right leads to a small 1/2 bath:

Moved into this house in 2007, and for the past five years the converted garage ("bonus room") has been severely underutilized. Until now .... Time to use this wonderful space and build a respectable recording and mixing studio AND generally awesome man cave.

It's painted a wild shade of red, and rather than repaint I'm going to name this place "All Red Recording" and go with it.

Hope you folks enjoy periodic updates and plenty of pictures of the planning, organization, and building of this studio!

The planning stages are well underway. A friend of mine is an interior designer and she hooked me up with some CAD drawings. With her help, and that of Glenn from GIK Acoustics right here on GS, I chose this as the proper setup.

There are large glass paneled double doors on the walls top and left. The opening on the bottom right leads to a small 1/2 bath:

I chose Roxul Safe n Sound because I found it to be a decent compromise of price and availability to the performance of Rockwool 60 and the like. Pack of 8 3" panels is $50 at Lowe's.

Four traps will be double thick (6") and 2'x4'. Cost is around $150. I built the frames last night:

Laid out:

Pre-drilling. Lasers are awesome:

Corner braces:

Finished frames:

Fabric and insulation should arrive next week. Will post up once I can get these babies wrapped up!

Interested to see how you traps look after completion. I used the same pdf to make mine a couple of years ago.

I used 2 pieces of OC703 2" per trap. The look OK except when pulling the fabric tight, the corners collapsed, causing more of a "rounded" look on the corners where the fiberglass isn't supported by any wood,.. which I don't like.

The corners were already a little less "stiff" right out of the shipping boxes, which is why I'm sure the gave way under the pressure of the tightened fabric.

Interested to see how you traps look after completion. I used the same pdf to make mine a couple of years ago.

I used 2 pieces of OC703 2" per trap. The look OK except when pulling the fabric tight, the corners collapsed, causing more of a "rounded" look on the corners where the fiberglass isn't supported by any wood,.. which I don't like.

Yes I'm anticipating a more rounded look because of the frame design and because I'm using safe and sound which is less rigid than rockwool or OC.

Besides general clean-up and rearrangement, I completed the first set of acoustic panels. I started with bass traps using two panels for 6" thickness. Here's the Safe n Sound:

I highly recommend getting your hands on an air staple gun. I probably did 100 staples per panel and a normal staple gun would kill your hand. Here's putting the muslin ticking on to seal the insulation fibers in the back:

And here is a finished trap covered in grey speaker cloth from Parts Express:

Not too shabby. They are a bit lumpy, especially at the edges. And I'm a little concerned about sagging. We'll see. Still trying to figure out the best way to mount these babies.

That's the plan. I've got materials for eight 3" panels on order right now. I'll probably need more after that.

Honestly, to get some serious basstrapping going, we're talking about a lot more absorption. Think of at 10-20cm thick and more than 50% of walls and ceiling. Then you might get a serious difference...

New panels hung, including a "cloud" panel, and new monitors (Equator D5). Really digging the Equators. Still need to mount a panel, dead center in front of and above the mix desk, on that angle surface b/w the wall and ceiling.

I'm surprised that you're still getting such long decay times in the high end with the amount of panels you have in the room. I would expect that more high end absorption would be evident.

It's a big room and the floor is cement. I need to get some large area rugs and, truly, I need more panels. But I'm sick of building them right now ....

Was thinking more about muziekschuur's comment about spacing them off the wall, and I realized that the design of my panels puts 1 1/2" of space between the wall and the absorbant material. Is that the same as a coke bottle??